Indonesia ride hailing major Go-Jek to make debut in India

Eyeing a huge opportunity in the nascent market of bike-taxi service in India, Indonesia-based ride-hailing company Go-Jek is planning to launch its two-wheelers service in the second half of 2018.

The hyperlocal transport giant is reportedly evaluating some southern cities to start with. It may start a pilot in millennium city and other parts of NCR region.

SoftBank-backed Go-Jek started as a bike taxi business but later diversified into food, courier, and grocery delivery. Besides consumer-facing units, it also has a marketplace for truck renting.

Ola and Uber have been operating their bike taxi services in Delhi (NCR) and a few other cities for past couple of years.

Interestingly, the launch speculation has come at a time when Ola made a re-entry into food delivery segment with Foodpanda acquisition. Uber operates its global food delivery unit UberEats across four cities in India.

The Go-Jek launch will add on a serious competitor with a deep pocket for Ola and Uber. While it’s not known that whether Go-Jek will launch its food ordering or not, it does more orders than Indian counterparts Swiggy, Zomato and Foodpanda collectively.

Earlier, Go-Jek had made several bets on Indian startups in 2016 including Pune-based mobile application developer Leftshift, Bengaluru-based Pianta and C42 Engineering, and Delhi-based CodeIgnition.

The Jakarta-headquartered company later set up a product development and training centre in Bengaluru and hired people across roles ranging from data scientists to full-stack engineers, designers, and product managers.

In Southeast Asia, Go-Jek competes with Singapore-based ride-hailing company Grab. Apart from Ola Bike taxi and UberMOTO, Go-Jek will also compete with local startups such as Delhi based Baxi, Rapido, Noida-based Bike taxi NOW and a few others.

Founded in 2011, Go-Jek was set up by Nadiem Makarim, a Harvard alumnus who also worked at global management consulting firm McKinsey.

Go-Jek claims to have over 200,000 drivers across some 25 cities in Indonesia. It delivers everything from ride and meals to groceries cleaners, masseuses, and hairdressers across the Indonesian capital.

Google, Sequoia, Tencent and JD Inc had invested about $2 billion in it. Last year, Go-Jek had raked in $1.2 billion from Tencent. Earlier this week, Indonesian conglomerate Astra International also announced to invest $150 million in the ride-hailing app.